In this episode, Joy welcomes Julie Frey from Wolters Kluwer Health, who heads the Provider product division. They explore Wolters Kluwer's role in healthcare, focusing on clinical decision support tools like UpToDate, which provide clinicians with timely and accurate information at the point of care. Julie highlights the company's mission to alleviate clinician burnout by empowering them with efficient tools and discusses the future of healthcare, emphasizing the importance of connecting clinicians and patients for holistic care.
Episode Highlights
[00:01:01] Overview of Wolters Kluwer Health and its global presence
[00:02:04] Clinical decision support and patient engagement tools
[00:06:16] Clinician challenges and the importance of patient engagement in healthcare
[00:16:33] Julie Frey's journey into healthcare, starting from corporate strategy to a focus on health division projects
[00:19:34] Julie Frey's motivation and excitement about the intrinsic purpose in healthcare
[00:19:59] Ways to connect with Julie Frey and Wolters Kluwer Health
Stay connected to Julie Frey:
- LinkedIn | Twitter
- Wolters Kluwer | LinkedIn
[00:00:00] Joy Rios: Hello there, and welcome to the HIT Like a Girl podcast. My name is Joy Rios. This is a show where we get to talk about how the crazy, complicated world of health care is. We're all trying to put the 30,000 or 300, 000, however big you think it is, the puzzle pieces together. So each one of our guests gets to bring a piece of their expertise and share their piece of the puzzle with our listeners.
So I'm excited for today's guest, Julie, can you please take a moment to introduce yourself?
[00:00:36] Julie Frey: Hi, everybody. I'm Julie Frey, and I head up the Provider product at Wolters Kluwer Health. And I'm super, super excited to be here today and to talk all things healthcare and women in healthcare. It’s very exciting.
[00:00:49] Joy Rios: Alright. Can you please share the name of your organization again, because I feel like people and I'm including myself in this, it's hard to pronounce and want to understand what you guys do there because you do a lot.
[00:01:01] Julie Frey: Of course, it's Wolters Kluwer is how you say it. It's originally a Dutch company, hence the spelling.
I actually made an internal push that I said maybe we should just rebrand as WK. I feel like people would feel more comfortable saying the name, but that didn't get any traction. So we are a company that's actually much broader than healthcare. We have four different divisions. We're global in nature.
So just order of magnitude, think 20,000 employees. Originally, as I said, a Dutch company. We specialize in all things, information and technology for professionals. And so healthcare is one of them. We have another one that's tax and accounting, another one that's legal, and a final one that's compliance and related assets.
And yes, I'm in the healthcare division. We have a number of product categories, but just in terms of orienting yourself around where I work. We're focused on clinical decision support. So really solutions at the point of care for clinicians. We also have a set of patient engagement tools. So just the patient component of that.
[00:02:04] Joy Rios: Okay. So now when we think about the assets that you have, can you explain what that is? Cause I'm bringing this up for two reasons. We do, so at HIT Like a Girl pod, we have a book club and our book club is really geeky. We do federal rules and their drafts and to women that are from your organization that have done a little bit of helping me understand what you guys do. But I want to hear from you too.
[00:02:28] Julie Frey: Sure. I'm excited to. Let me tell you someone, you tell me if I can help give other examples. We have evidence based content which is integrated into a set of tools and it is available at the point of care to help clinicians make decisions. So if you think of it as an example, you're a clinician, you have a patient in front of you, the patient has, you've diagnosed the patient as having a certain condition, and you either want to double check, or you want some support in trying to decide what is the best treatment path for that patient.
You go into our tool. There's clinical components of our tools. There's drug components. A lot of it is making decisions around drugs and dosing, but it's well beyond that. We provide you that guidance and those answers. And so at the most simple, that's what it is. It's all point of care related.
If you think of it, if you more broadly around different types of tools that a clinician might access, these are the ones where you've got 15 minutes with a patient and you need to quickly get to a decision.
[00:03:23] Joy Rios: So it's gotta be massive amounts of data, a data library that is pointing a clinician to the right piece at the right, exactly the right time.
[00:03:33] Julie Frey: You've got it. So that's why the interface is actually intentionally very simple. Maybe this helps. You just have, you have a search bar effectively and you search for something fairly specific. And that's what comes up and there's no bells and whistles. There's nothing else there. We're trying to declutter and not add any more burden on to the clinician.
We see ourselves squarely on the side of the clinician. It's in some ways recreating what I think many clinicians experienced 30 years ago. If you were in a small institution, and you weren't sure about something stick your, you'll head out of the room and you'd ask a colleague, “Hey, I was thinking of treating with this drug. What do you think?” And then you could consult for a second informally and you could come back. That's effectively what we're working to do at scale.
[00:04:14] Joy Rios: Okay. So that's super powerful. Imagine, I'm just thinking of the amount of information that if I could ask anybody, “Okay, is this the right choice? Is this the right, in any direction?” That's insanely powerful at the time of care.
[00:04:31] Julie Frey: Maybe just for the, those in the audience that are in healthcare, the main, the flagship brand in this portfolio is UpToDate. I'm so impressed that they got that name probably 30 years ago or more.
It's such an effective name. It literally is that. So it's this huge library of content. And then one of our other assets is incorporating new information. So as things change, bringing in new information and helping doctors literally stay up to date. And it's something that one of the reasons that I've been so excited to work with these products is.
It's such a mission driven organization, and it's really, clinicians really love it. One of the fascinating things here is, I think, clinicians today have to deal with so many tools, have to spend so much time in the EHR. Much of it, let's say, is begrudgingly what's so special about working on UpToDate is clinicians love to use it.
We're not making them jump through hoops. We're just there to build their confidence to help them help the patients. That's really our mission.
[00:05:28] Joy Rios: I imagine that there's a play there on burnout too, right? If you're in a position to help the clinician get what they need and help them do what they need faster and with more confidence, you're playing into their own well being.
[00:05:41] Julie Frey: Absolutely. And we hear that consistently. We run surveys and another type of structured survey called the Net Promoter Score, which is really trying to understand how our users think about us. And every year consistently, I've never, I've worked across many products in my career and I've never seen anything like this.
People really feel really good about using our tool and we're helping them.
[00:06:03] Joy Rios: That's amazing. Tell me more. I guess ultimately what I mean is technology is playing a role in alleviating burnout. So pull that thread.
[00:06:16] Julie Frey: Clinicians have more patients than they've ever had. They have more pressure on other kind of administrative steps around documentation, connecting with a pair, reporting, all kinds of metrics coming from all directions.
They have less time than ever to consult. They have less time than ever to refresh themselves. The kind of body of knowledge and evidence is growing at exponential rate. So even if didn't have all those other pressures I mentioned, you can't your journal once a month in your specialty and scan it and feel like you're up to date.
Things are changing faster and in a much more complex way. And again, as I said, just the volume. And our mission is to reduce that and to support them at scale. I think the next frontier, because I'm always saying I'm really proud, I'm really proud of our history and our legacy and the relationship that we have with over 2 million clinicians globally.
But the next frontier I think is if you want to reduce that burden further and you're not an EHR or another kind of documenting tool, the next frontier is connecting it more to the patient piece. And that's one of the philosophies of why we've been investing on the patient education and engagement side, because I think if you want to reduce it further, it's how do you support that shared decision making between the clinician and the patient?
How do you enable confidence on the patient side and the decisions that the clinician is making? How do you empower the patient to take more control themselves? A lot of conditions that clinicians are treating in the U. S. in particular is chronic based. There's a big patient component of those conditions.
And I think if we start to support and empower them in line with how we're empowering conditions, that's when you unlock the next level of helping a bit on clinician burnouts and unrelated struggles.
[00:08:04] Joy Rios: I love that. It's basically, is that a whole different set of data?
Because you're, okay, they've got up to date data about a particular condition, but then there's a whole other library about what do you do with that? Those are two very different conversations.
[00:08:18] Julie Frey: We have a huge internal project we talk about internally as a harmonization project. But it's really thinking through if you have these disparate assets and historically, I think vendors have thought of this patient things and this clinician things again, as I said, the future to me, it's all the care team.
And I think the patient is part of that care team. And I think for a long time, we've heard buzzwords of patient centricity and kind of digital tools enabling them. And there's great progress on that. But I think that kind of, where you unlock the next level, is where you start to think about connecting the clinician, the patient.
And that's a big part of what we're doing. So if we're advising the clinician in this way, and we're guiding them, what kind of challenges do they face in actually being able to treat the patient? If they, if we can give them the right guidance and they buy in and they support our recommendations, then how do we get that to the patient?
How do we facilitate the conversation? There's all kinds of different nuances there, and I think that's the next big set of work that we're doing.
[00:09:14] Joy Rios: Okay, so something that's coming up for me is whole patient care and the way and so when we talk about, in a patient journey, if they come in something's wrong with their head and they're going to see the doctor but they actually also have something wrong with their stomach or their foot. That person, that doctor that they're talking to might not be able to support them in their whole care. How does what you guys do at WK, is what I'm going to say, support that in the patient's whole experience and setting up a clinician to better care for the entire human and not just a special part of them?
[00:09:56] Julie Frey: What you're describing, I think what we say, see in our customer base is this is particularly happening in primary care.
So there's this huge supply, as you, I'm sure you're familiar, huge supply demand gap between providers and patients. The kind of nexus of that is happening in primary care. When you can't get to a specialist, when you can't get the help you need, there's, you go to primary care. These PCPs are now dealing with a range of conditions.
You have another, you have a couple of other factors that are playing in here. We have an aging population. We have a greater and greater percent of our population that has multiple chronic conditions and other ailments that are happening. These primary, these PCPs have 15 minutes. And so when we speak to them and we say, how are you dealing with this?
They say, to be candid, we have folks with five, seven things that we could we could support them on. And I'm just thinking about what is the most acute? What is the most critical? And I just do not have time to deal with the rest. I don't have time. If it can mean, if there's a kind of a maintenance type situation, I'm letting that continue until I can see them next, which is just so sad.
I don't think that's what's, how PCPs want to make patients better. They want to provide the best care. They want to provide evidence based care, and they're limited when those sorts of things happen. So one of the ways that we're thinking about it is particularly on our patient engagement tools. We're thinking about how do we, no matter what the support is, so let's imagine a clinician is providing some patient engagement around a chronic condition.
Because that is, as I said, a lot of what care is about these days. We are thinking about the whole patient in that context and one of the big components that comes up all the time is mental health and mental health challenges and need for mental health. So as while this is a product for the patient around a particular chronic condition, we're embedding components of mental health and other things to support the whole patient as they make decisions about treatment and things like that for chronic condition.
So I think we're trying to infuse it in everything we're doing. I don't think you can compartmentalize. I think that's where things start to break down or how things were thought of before in a kind of siloed manner. So it's the whole care team, including the patient, and it's thinking about the whole patient as opposed to just the most acute thing.
[00:12:11] Joy Rios: And I love the idea of also leading a little bit with the mental health aspect, because I feel like regardless of what's going on with your body, if you can't wrap your head around it that's a major issue. Can we talk about basically the mental health perspective too, because that seems to be one that is more prominent these days for good reason.
What is the increased demand specifically for mental health care on primary care physicians?
[00:12:39] Julie Frey: It goes back to a supply demand gap. That's certainly one component of it. Historically there's multiple components. Historically, many patients wouldn't see care. And I think a little bit accelerated by COVID, there's more of an acceptance and a support of treating patients with mental health conditions.
And so patients are more comfortable coming forward. I think COVID exacerbated many components of mental health as well. So the supply to demand gap has exacerbated. And now again, as we described, this becomes a PCP problem. I saw a incredible stat. I think approximately 80 percent of antidepressants are prescribed by PCPs, which I was just shocked by.
Again there's many other more complex mental health conditions that specialists are prescribing for unipolar depression, 80 percent of antidepressants are prescribed by PCPs. So the pressure on PCPs here is particularly acute. And exactly as you said, what they, what our customers say to us is if we can't support them on mental health, when we're trying to manage a bunch of other chronic and other conditions, it becomes so much harder.
Medication adherence becomes harder. It exacerbates all kinds of other conditions. And so when we speak, this is interesting, but there's a disconnect. If you speak to executives in these health systems, their perspective is PCPs can only do so much. They've only received so much mental health training as part of their broader training.
And they need to refer them to refer out to specialists when it becomes too tough for them. But if we speak to our users they say something else, which is they say there's no one to refer them to. If I refer them, they're just going to come back or they're not going to take the other medicines that we prescribe for other conditions.
We have to be better equipped to support them in the short term, at least while there's this demand supply gap. It's the only way to move forward. And so it's been interesting to hear that. And so what we've been thinking about a lot is, we have for many years had a huge library of clinical and drug content and patient engagement tools around mental health.
That's not new. What we're trying, what we've invested in significantly and continue to invest is how do we build out that set of tools? How do we make it more comprehensive? One of the things that's been very interesting recently and it's a project I'm working on just to make this kind of more specific and pointed is one of the specific challenges PCPs are facing is around cross tapering.
So a patient's on a drug, you want to move them to another, the drug's not working. You want to move them to another drug. You've got to remember all the different combinations of the different drugs. You can move them one to the other, the different dosing as you're tapering them from one and ramping up from the other one.
What you have to do, you have to do a bunch of math in your head. There's many drugs that you could take. And so as an example, we've always had information around cross tapering, but we're not building a cross tapering tool. We don't even have to think. So I think we're trying to get really pointed at helping some of the areas that have been particularly difficult for PCP.
[00:15:36] Joy Rios: I think that one thing that we all suffer from, I'm definitely including myself in this, is just drinking from the fire hose. There's just so much to know and understand if you really want to be supportive and helpful of people. It's just you also have to be thoughtful about what is accurate information? What is useful information? And how can you get it to at the right time, at the right time to the right people? And it sounds like that's what you guys do. Just, we're not inventing medicine.
[00:16:03] Julie Frey: We are trying to distill it and focus it and give clarity and transparency around the grade of the evidence and the source of the evidence so that clinicians can build confidence in the decisions they're making. And then that supports the patient engagement piece as well.
[00:16:20] Joy Rios: Okay, so can I ask you a personal question? What did you study? How did you get your job? What is your own trajectory in how you got to where you are now to get to do what you get to do?
[00:16:33] Julie Frey: I've heard some of your prior podcasts and I think maybe I got here the same way as some of you other guests.
I found my way into health care. So it wasn't a calling. I studied economics. I grew up in South Africa. I studied economics. I worked in different industries unrelated to health care. I actually joined Wolters Kluwer in corporate strategy, and so I was thinking about M&A and business turnarounds and portfolio management and all these things.
And one of our four divisions is health as I said, and I ended up just doing a lot of work in our health division, and I loved it, and I never felt such intrinsic motivation. And I felt really proud about the mission driven nature. We really, while we're a public company there's P&Ls, I won't pretend otherwise, but there's such a philosophy around doing the right thing for the clinician, doing it in an unbiased way.
We have so much energy and thought has been put into how to ensure that we lead by the evidence and we lead by what's most critical for the clinician. And it was just so inspiring to see. And it was so inspiring to see the reach that we had. And so anyway, I worked on multiple projects. I worked on projects looking at our international strategy.
I worked on many different things. And in corporate strategy, which was what I spent a couple of years in at Wolters Kluwer before, you do this really interesting project, you come up with a recommendation, and then you have to hand it over to the business, right? And you say, here, this is what we should do.
We did this analysis, we recommend this whatever it is. You had your baby over and then you got to move on to the next thing. And at one point, probably almost three years ago, two and a half years ago, the privacy of the current business unit I'm in she was, “Aren't you tired of doing that? Aren't you ready to come and get your hands dirty and move to the operating side?”
I had at that point spent several years working specifically in healthcare strategy and I was, “I'm so ready. I'm so ready.” And and so I moved over. That was really it. And I moved over and I have been focusing on our provider strategy ever since.
That's what I live and breathe. And it's been very inspiring. Susquehanna Health is run by a woman and actually, in fact Susquehanna overall is run by a woman, Nancy McKinstry, who's incredibly inspiring. And yeah,I don't know, I never thought I would end up here to be honest. It wasn't like when I was six years old, this was my dream, but it happened very organically.
And what feels right about it, as I mentioned, is the intrinsic motivation. I have so much energy. This doesn't feel like a burden. It doesn't feel, I'm really excited about it. And I feel like there's just so much opportunity to do good. And we have, I feel like we also have a responsibility.
There's such a reach. We're in really all the big health systems in the US, we're in many internationally. And so the decisions we make impact millions of clinicians and as a result, many more millions of patients.
[00:19:34] Joy Rios: That's a really empowering place to sit, right? And one thing I love about healthcare, I feel like once you're in, it's so hard to get out because of that intrinsic purpose that you feel. Wow, we are faced with some really big challenges. But then the flip side is that there's also some really good opportunities to do good.
Julie, if people want to follow your work and work with you or somehow get involved, like how would you direct them?
[00:19:59] Julie Frey: Probably these days the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. I'm Julie Frey on LinkedIn. I don't believe there's many others.
I would be so happy to engage. Figured out a way to connect with lots of women within Wolters Kluwer. And again, it's like a very female oriented organization. And that's one of the reasons I've stayed and I loved it. I have not cracked the knot. I'm beyond that. And I would so love to do that.
[00:20:22] Joy Rios: Yeah, I'll share with you we actually do have a LinkedIn group for guests and listeners to connect. It's, the whole intention behind it is just to expand people's networks. There's not that much activity that goes on, but it's allowing people to connect on LinkedIn to get to know people and expand our networks. So I can help you crack that nut.
[00:20:42] Julie Frey: Thank you. That's fantastic. Thanks so much. Thanks.
[00:20:44] Joy Rios: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for joining and thank you for sharing your expertise. I really appreciate it.
[00:20:49] Julie Frey: Yes. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.
[00:20:51] Joy Rios: Thanks for listening. You can learn more about us or this guest by going to our website or visiting us on any of the socials with the handle HIT Like a Girl pod. Thanks again. See you soon.
Again, thank you so much for listening to the HIT Like a Girl podcast. I am truly grateful for you, and I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave us a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend?
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